Tuesday, March 02, 2010

Thin sliced thoughts even thinner

1. A friend forwarded this Angier piece (in the Times, of course) about filmmaking, pink noise, and the control of attention:

Hollywood filmmakers, whether they know it or not, have become steadily more adroit at shaping basic movie structure to match the pulsatile, half-smooth, half-raggedy way we attend to the world around us. This mounting synchrony between movie pace and the bouncing ball of the mind’s inner eye may help explain why today’s films manage to seize and shackle audience attention so ruthlessly...

2. As regards the very well-described effect of introducing competing narratives into the info-glut, which Andrejevic sums up as:

By multiplying the narratives—and in particular, those narratives that cast uncertainty on one another—the goal is to highlight the absence of any ‘objective’ standard for arbitrating between them.

It should be noted that this strategy has tremendous leverage -- maximal, really -- within a journalistic practice that attempts to present fair and balanced, equally weighted but incompatible judgments (or perspectives) because this sort of cravenly feckless (candyass) approach is precisely what the USian journalistic establishment calls objective.

The putting together of some facts "in context with some other facts," -- the judgment to do that sensibly and relevantly, seems to be lacking in broadcast media of most stripes. Any idea why this might be so?

Well, you went to a certain Graduate School of Journalism, just as I did. Did you not happen to notice the anti-intellectualism of the place? With a few exceptions (usually among the students from overseas) whatever looked like intellectual activity usually turned out to be status-seeking. I don't think the place was dictating the values of professional journalism so much as it was simply reflecting them.

Media - our media - take their cue from the last thing they did that pleased their audience, their sponsor, or their bosses. It's pretty basic, high school stuff. They look at each other, make sure everyone is wearing the same boob loaf, and try to remember to brush their teeth. The idea that what they do is connected to, say, Hegel, or Montesquieu, or Constant has not been recently entertained.